Fluent in TikTok, Lost on a Spreadsheet

What Australia's latest ICT literacy results actually mean at home

It started with a text on a Sunday afternoon.

I was standing at the kitchen bench, looking at a pile of washing on the dining table that had been folded but not quite put away, when a friend messaged me.

"Cat. My son has been on his phone for four hours. Says he's doing research for his history assignment. I walked past and looked at the screen. He typed the whole question into Google, clicked the first result and copied the first paragraph. What do I do?"

Her son is fourteen and has grown up online. He found his way around YouTube before he could tie his shoelaces. He now runs multiple Discord servers, each with its own rules, channels and community expectations. He knows how to navigate platforms, customise settings, solve technical problems and find his way around digital spaces that many adults would find confusing. Nobody looking at him would describe him as digitally inexperienced.

Digital confidence can look like capability, but young people still need support to question, compare and judge the information they find online.

Many young people appear extraordinarily comfortable with technology, moving through digital spaces quickly, confidently and independently. From the outside, it can look like they know exactly what they are doing online.

A few weeks later, I was reading Australia's latest ICT literacy results and found myself thinking about that same text message. In May, ACARA released the results of the 2025 National Assessment Program for ICT Literacy. Just 37 per cent of Year 10 students achieved the proficient standard. For Year 6 students, the figure was 50 per cent.

Those numbers surprised many people because they seem difficult to reconcile with what families often see at home. Today's children have grown up surrounded by devices, apps, games, streaming services, search engines, social media and increasingly artificial intelligence tools. They are the most connected generation Australia has ever raised. Reading further, however, it became clear that the assessment was not measuring how comfortable students feel with technology. It was measuring something much more specific: whether students could use technology to find, evaluate, create and communicate information effectively.

Reading the report, I found myself thinking about the language we use in these conversations. Digital literacy and digital citizenship are often spoken about as though they mean the same thing. They overlap, but they describe different capabilities, which can make conversations like this surprisingly confusing for parents.

Digital literacy focuses on the knowledge and skills needed to work with information and technology. It includes searching effectively, evaluating sources, creating digital content, communicating appropriately and understanding how digital tools function.

Digital citizenship reaches into a broader set of questions. It asks how young people participate online, how they treat others, how they manage identity and wellbeing, how they respond to influence and pressure, and how they make decisions as digital and physical life constantly intersect. A child can be developing both at the same time. They can also be strong in one area and still need support in the other.

Looking back at my friend's message, I realised she was not questioning whether her son knew how to use Google; she already knew he did. What surprised her was that he had never stopped to question what Google gave him, and that skill does not automatically develop through screen time alone. Being online for four hours a day does not necessarily teach a young person how to compare sources, refine a search, recognise bias, identify commercial interests or work through conflicting information. Those skills usually develop through practice, conversation and guidance.

This is one of the reasons I worry that public conversations about children and technology are usually focused on how long young people spend on screens. Time tells us something, but it does not tell us everything.

Two children could spend exactly the same number of hours online and have completely different experiences. One might be creating, researching, collaborating and solving problems. Another might be scrolling through content chosen for them by an algorithm. Most young people probably move somewhere between those two experiences depending on the day. The question is not how much time children spend online but what they are learning while they are there. For parents, that does not mean becoming an expert in every platform your child uses. It does not require a degree in media studies or a detailed understanding of the latest AI tool.

Try this

The next time your child is doing anything online that involves looking something up, whether for school, for an argument they want to win or for a product they want you to buy, sit alongside them for a few minutes.

Then try one of these:

"How did you decide to search for that?" Not a gotcha. A real question. Most kids have never been asked to reflect on the words they type into a search bar.

"Who wrote this, do you think? And why?" Source evaluation does not need to become a media literacy lecture. It can be a passing observation. “That’s interesting, who is this site? Let’s have a quick look at who they are.”

"What would you do if you found two websites that completely disagreed with each other?" This one usually produces a long pause. A long pause is exactly what you want because it often signals that thinking has begun.

"If Google disappeared tomorrow, how would you figure this out?" Slightly chaotic energy, genuinely useful. It gets at whether children understand that information exists beyond the top three search results.

You do not need to do all of these at once. One question over afternoon homework or during a conversation at the dinner table can be enough to start thinking in a different way. You are not trying to replicate a school program in your kitchen. You are offering something technology cannot really replicate: another perspective, another question, and another way of looking at the information in front of them.

My friend texted again later that evening.

She sat down with her son after dinner and asked him to show her what he had found. At some point, she asked, “How do you know this bit is true?”

Forty-five minutes later, they had compared multiple sources, discovered that one of them had been written by someone selling something related to the topic and rewritten part of the assignment. She told me afterwards that it was the longest conversation they had shared all week.

The assignment was better by the end of it, but that was not really the point. The better part was how a homework problem had opened into a conversation about information, evidence and trust. That is where digital capability starts to become something more than speed on a screen, in the pause where a child begins to ask whether an answer deserves to be believed.

Source and notes

Primary source: ACARA, National Assessment Program – ICT Literacy 2025 Public Report, released May 2026.

Key figures: In 2025, 50 per cent of Year 6 students and 37 per cent of Year 10 students achieved at or above the proficient standard in Information and Communication Technology Literacy.